by Joe Moran
But this idea of the coronation as a watershed for both television and the nation is unconvincing. By then, television in Britain was nearly thirty years old, had accumulated thousands of broadcasting hours and been seen by millions. One reason for this widespread belief that 1953 was television’s year zero is the sparse evidence of moving images before then. The coronation marked the start of the wide use of telerecording, a crude method of making a copy of a programme as it went out live by pointing a 16mm film camera at the screen – which had the side effect of giving us a poor sense of what it was like for viewers to watch at the time, for it is like looking at the world through a Vaseline-smeared lens. Hardly any pre-1953 television survives, consigning once unforgettable characters like Joan Gilbert and Algernon Blackwood to the prehistoric era, a half-memory getting ever fainter as each year the number of viewers who saw them declines.
Nor does it seem right, as historian D. R. Thorpe suggests, that ‘it was actually the television coverage of King George VI’s funeral, watched in countless shared “front rooms”, that sparked off the mass purchasing of sets in time for 2 June 1953’. The king’s funeral procession was certainly seen by the largest television audience yet, about 4.5 million people. Kirk O’Shotts was even opened for a single day on 15 February, a month before its official opening, to broadcast it, although, since the BBC only announced this the day before, it is unlikely that many Scots saw it. The funeral was also an event made for televising. The black-veiled new queen, the lilies on the coffin quivering in the breeze, the birds flying above Windsor Castle’s Round Tower as the flag was lowered, all showed up in beautiful chiaroscuro. ‘Almost it seemed too intimate a picture for public diffusion,’ wrote Reginald Pound in the Listener. ‘One’s impulse was to step back from the screen, to have no part in this magnificent trespass.’ But the coming of mass television was a continuum, not something sparked by one event. The number of new television licences rose from 400,000 in 1950, to 700,000 in 1951 and 1952, to 1,100,000 in 1953, suggesting that the sales hike for the coronation was part of a steady, inexorable rise.42
A Coronation Commission, chaired by Prince Philip, had ruled that the Westminster Abbey ceremony would not be televised, the sole concession being to allow cameras west of the organ screen so the processions could be seen. The phrase ‘west of the organ screen’ was repeated ad infinitum over the course of 1952. For some it came to symbolise the anachronism of a pre-war caste system which offered a privileged view to the favoured few. ‘Beyond the precincts of Westminster, from the shores of Cornwall to the grey waters of the Clyde, from the warm sunlight of the Weald of Kent to the green-blue loveliness of the Lakes,’ wrote the Daily Mirror’s Cassandra, ‘at least fifteen million of Her Majesty’s subjects will be abruptly shuttered off by what appears to be a monumental piece of mis-judgement.’ For others, the organ screen defended precious tradition from the pernicious instincts of mass voyeurism. In this camp was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, who, preparing to sail home from the US in September 1952, told reporters, ‘The world would have been a happier place if television had never been discovered.’43
The undisclosed reason for the Commission’s decision was the Queen’s reluctance to be televised. There were no cameras in the Abbey at her wedding in 1947, she refused to let her Christmas broadcast be filmed and she had asked the BBC not to let cameras settle on her face during Horse Guards Parade or Trooping the Colour. A number of grey eminences, notably Lord Swinton, a veteran in Churchill’s cabinet, succeeded in persuading her, and in October, the Commission decided that cameras would be allowed beyond the screen, as long as there were ‘no close-ups’. There was a rumour that the Queen’s grandmother, Queen Mary, had been decisive in allowing television into the Abbey because she would be too ill to attend in person. But the rumour was untrue – and irrelevant because, three months before the coronation was broadcast on television, she died.44
The news that the coronation would be fully televised increased the pressure to make television truly national. Worried about a resurgent Germany and the onset of the Cold War, in 1951 the government had diverted money into rearmament and indefinitely postponed the building of more transmitters. In the north-east, miners’ lodges passed resolutions against the region’s continuing televisual deprivation, and Whitley Bay council lobbied the government on behalf of the 3 million people cut off by the Pennines from the Holme Moss signal. In October 1952, the same month that the Coronation Commission reversed its decision, the Postmaster General announced that transmitters at Pontop Pike, a moorland peak in County Durham, and Glencairn Hill, in the Belfast hills overlooking the city, would be built after all, so that people in these areas could see the coronation. Opening on the same day, 1 May 1953, these one-kilowatt masts were makeshift, austerity affairs housed in old pre-war outside-broadcast vans, with none of the soaring grandeur of Sutton Coldfield or Holme Moss. On each hilltop, a skeleton staff of eight engineers lived in a rudimentary wooden hut with an Elsan chemical toilet.
The Belfast signal had to be routed through Kirk O’Shotts, across seventy miles of Scottish hills and thirty miles of sea, and by the time it was scattered over the rooftops of the six counties to about 900 TV aerials, the results were mixed. Belfast and the flat country surrounding the city got a passable reception, but beyond it there were only fading pictures and the sound arriving in whispers. In this poorest part of the kingdom there was little clamour for television, but Ulster Unionists welcomed it as a sign that Northern Ireland was fully part of the UK, while Irish Nationalists were deeply suspicious not only of the coronation but of the anglicising influence of BBC television. Thomas Henderson, MP for the Shankill, said that ‘all creeds and classes not only in Northern Ireland but throughout the great British Commonwealth of Nations’ were looking forward to the coronation ‘with pleasure and joy’. The existence of a Royal Ulster Constabulary armed guard, stationed at the transmitter, suggested otherwise.45
Many who had rented or bought televisions especially for the coronation had them installed in time for the FA Cup Final, the first football game to reach a mass TV audience, and the first to be postponed until the end of the football league so that people watching it on television would not affect attendance at other games. One BBC executive commented that the main worry in the north-east was ‘not whether the transmitter will be radiating in time for the coronation, but whether it will be working in time for them to see the Cup Final’.46 The twenty-year-old John Moynihan, later a football writer, was invited to an FA Cup Final tea party at a mansion block in St John’s Wood to watch on a set owned by his friend’s father, a Jewish antique dealer. The roar that greeted the teams, he wrote, ‘resounded out of every crack of Mr H’s set’ and ‘the ball made a tump thumping sound in the television like firm punching in a boxing ring’.
The game was dull but with a thrilling ending: Blackpool, 1–3 down to Bolton with twenty-two minutes left, managed to win 4–3 with two goals set up by the 38-year-old wizard of dribble, Stanley Matthews, whom most of the 10 million viewers were seeing for the first time, and who turned most neutrals into Blackpool fans. As he started to run the game, Moynihan wrote, ‘the pitch even on that small set seemed to push Matthews towards us and out into the room so that tiny, weaving figure was now the prince of the earth’. Blackpool’s winning goal in the dying moments saw the living room come to life as ‘men seized cushions and hugged them to their bellies … The room was electric, the television screen swarming with Blackpool players hugging and embracing and we were hugging and embracing.’47 It was already clear that televised football could rouse the most passive viewer in a way that a royal event never could. The mass viewing of the ‘Matthews final’ was a watershed in the acceptance of the FA Cup Final as the key English national sporting ritual. Comparing it with the Lord’s Test on the same day, where England’s batsmen had struggled, the great cricket writer Neville Cardus wondered if the ‘drama and heroism’ of the final was indicative of football replacing cricket
as the ‘game of the people’.48
In the days leading up to the coronation, viewers adjusted their sets while picking up the build-up programmes. On About the Home, the television chef Marguerite Patten told them how to pre-prepare melon cocktails and salmon mousse to eat in front of the television. Two Metropolitan police officers gave advice to viewers on preventing house burglars on coronation day, and how to behave along the coronation route. On coronation eve, cameras on the Mall showed the already continuous line of pavement occupants and occasional tree dwellers preparing to spend the night in the rain. The BBC’s Barrie Edgar talked to some of them, including a Swiss mountain guide and a family who had sailed all the way from Australia in a ketch. It was perhaps the first attempt at manufacturing atmosphere through a new genre, the vox pop, which Nick Clarke would later call ‘one of the most artificial kinds of broadcasting ever devised’.49
On Tuesday 2 June, BBC television opened earlier than ever, at 9.15 a.m., with the test card, to allow people to tweak their aerials. A million and a half people were gathering in public places, such as town hall ballrooms, hospitals and parish churches, which had all been granted a special collective licence to watch television. In London’s Royal Festival Hall, 3,000 holders of tickets, which had sold out within fifty-four minutes of going on sale in April, arrived at 10 a.m. and collected a packed lunch at the doors. The same number filled the Odeon at Leicester Square. Butlin’s holiday campers in resorts like Filey, Skegness and Clacton watched on big screens. In clubs along the Mall like the Reform and White’s, members watched in darkened rooms where they could also look through the windows at the curtained grandstands to see the procession in real life. A reporter present in one of these clubs wrote that ‘the experience seemed to break down some stubborn middle-class prejudices against television’.50
Some 20.4 million people watched at least half an hour of the service, nearly double the radio audience, with almost as many watching the processions. Since there were only 2.7 million television sets, that meant an average of seven and a half people to a set, excluding children, who were not counted in the stats. A Mass Observation researcher on the London Underground noticed how every family party was ‘carrying bags with food or bottles. And those with just bottles grinned at each other in an understanding sort of way. They were obviously all people going to TV parties.’ Bradford in the early morning, according to another Mass Observer, was ‘full of people crossing the city, with baskets of provisions and thermos flasks … half Bradford seemed to be off early to a television party with the other half’. Viewing parties had their own etiquette. Best clothes were the norm, with children sporting coronation favours and carrying their own cushions, and guests arriving with a small gift. The Daily Herald’s doctor advised that the set should be on the floor, resting on books, for ‘the best way to strain your eyes and get a first-class headache is by looking upwards’.51 Living rooms across Britain soon gave off a heady mixed scent of flowers, furniture polish and sweat.
We do not know how many viewers followed the pious instructions of newspapers that they add their own ‘Amens’ to the prayers and stand and repeat the cry ‘Vivat Regina!’ along with the Abbey congregation. Mass Observation’s investigators discovered that a reverent silence was certainly not being observed in front of all TV sets. Among the working classes, who tended to be neither strong royalists nor resentful republicans, comments were jocular. ‘Look at the Queen. She’s like a plum pudding by now, they’ve put so many dresses on her,’ said a young woman in an ice-cream parlour in a poor area of London where television and free ice cream for children were provided. ‘I bet they’ve doped him with bromide,’ said the hostess in a house in Finsbury Drive, Bradford, when the camera rested on Prince Charles in the gallery, with his hair neatly plastered down.52
Among the VIP-only audience at the Gaumont cinema, Manchester, there was the odd burst of applause for the Queen and Winston Churchill, combined with much shuffling, chatting and fidgeting. Nineteen-year-old Alan Bennett, on leave from his national service, watched at a friend’s house. ‘As so often with the central rituals of English life, I was in two minds about it,’ he said later. ‘Yes the pageantry was moving, the music thrilling, but I was a soldier. I knew there was no pageantry without a great deal of bullying.’ Bennett could already do an impression of Geoffrey Fisher who, despite his fears about television, seemed to be enjoying himself at the ceremony with his resonant recitations, and whom Bennett thought emblematic of that yet unnamed thing, the Establishment: ‘Not a whiff of doubt … that mixture of hypocrisy and self-assurance that will always get you to the top in English public life.’53
Mass Observation asked children to keep diaries before and after the coronation. Almost all watched the TV, often at aunties’ or grandparents’ houses, many making journeys of fifty or sixty miles in cars and on public transport to do so. Some were confused by what they saw – one thought the Queen was being crowned by Winston Churchill – and others were disappointed that it was not in colour, perhaps because they had heard so much beforehand about the Queen’s golden coach and her red velvet train. There were some non-viewers. ‘I hope that someone will at least be kind enough to let me have a short look at their Television Set,’ wrote eleven-year-old Peter Johnson, dejectedly. ‘Our next door neighbour has a Television Set but all I have seen of it is the aerial.’54
Many adults seemed unimpressed with the padding surrounding the ceremony. One Mass Observer pronounced himself ‘bored by the crowd reportage and lame bits of interviewing, and the three nightmare New Zealanders who the commentator seemed unable to get rid of’. Four other Mass Observers said they found the procession ‘boring’; another fell asleep during it. After the event, 109 viewers were asked what they thought was the day’s most inspiring moment. The crowning came second with eleven votes, seven behind that day’s news of the conquest of Everest, a moment unrecorded by television.55
Over 20 million viewers still left many people unaccounted for. ‘I did not fancy accepting any of the numerous invitations to TV as I regard it as a very inferior cinema and I felt the conversation would be inane,’ wrote one Mass Observation diarist. While this television agnostic actually ended up watching briefly at a friend’s house, another went walking on Dartmoor, ‘determined to avoid at all costs any news and activity connected with the Coronation’. Another arranged an anti-coronation party at which ‘republican songs were sung, the Queen symbolically executed and various anti-royalist parlour games played’. A student who tried to avoid the coronation by cycling through Sussex country lanes kept being reminded of it by the deserted villages, with bursts of noise coming from houses with television aerials and the curtains drawn. Joan Bakewell did not bother to watch with her fellow students on a TV set newly acquired by Newnham College, Cambridge, and she noted later that she had made no reference to the coronation in her diary for that day: ‘So much for all that fanciful talk about new Elizabethans.’56
Among those who watched it, though, there were some converts among the quasi-republicans. At 6 p.m. in Finsbury Drive, Bradford, the Mass Observation investigator dispatched someone to buy a bottle of Dry Fly sherry, and they all toasted the Queen, with remarks along the lines of: ‘Who could have thought that we would all have turned such Royalists?’ There was high praise for the BBC and the medium of television itself. Huw Wheldon, then BBC Television’s Publicity Officer, gave out audience reaction figures: ninety-eight per cent said they had enjoyed the broadcast ‘very much’. When a Daily Express reporter wondered what the recalcitrant had objected to, Wheldon replied, ‘If Our Lord came back to earth two per cent of the people would complain, “There He goes again, always walking on the water”.’57 Many praised Richard Dimbleby’s softly sonorous commentary, so expertly woven in between the Archbishop’s words and the blasts of trumpets that it was as though he were conducting the ceremony himself.
Viewers also commended the BBC on the quality of the pictures, for the newer television sets no longer had those cur
ved screens like cod’s eyes which warped the image when viewed at an angle. TV cameras now had derivative equalisers which eliminated distortion, and there were none of the blank screens and juddering images which used to occur when switching from one camera to another. The new zoom lenses allowed cameras to move in smoothly and, as Queen Elizabeth walked down the aisle, her face grew bigger in the frame as the ill-defined rule about close-ups was disregarded. The popular historian and eager monarchist Arthur Bryant reflected that television was best when the actors were unconscious of it, thus avoiding ‘that note of forced insincerity which, as in early Victorian photographic groups, is its besetting fault as an artistic medium’. By these lights the Queen was a TV natural, with ‘the same unchallengeable ascendancy over the eye and mind of the watcher that Charlie Chaplin had on the cinema screen’.58
At 5.20 p.m., after the Queen’s last appearance on the Buckingham Palace balcony, twenty-six per cent of the adult population carried on watching the children’s programmes and about the same number stayed for the rest of the evening until, at 11.30 p.m., Richard Dimbleby delivered an unannounced, impromptu sermon, summing up the day from an empty, silent Westminster Abbey – ‘an epilogue sublime, touching and human as had been the great day itself’, according to the Television Annual for 1954.59
Many viewers must still have been watching this late because traffic was slack until midnight, when a rush of people returned home from their television parties and the last trams and buses were full. For the first time in British history, television had emptied streets and becalmed the nation. Thousands of viewers sent congratulations to the BBC or the Radio Times. ‘Praise may seem paltry and congratulations colourless but we must try to express our overwhelming gratitude,’ wrote Donald Davey of Uppermoor Pudsey. ‘To all who brought us such joy we can but say thank you, and again, thank you.’ In many parts of the provinces and regions, though, the feeling that the coronation was a London affair persisted until the day itself, ‘and even this was not entirely broken down by the chance to participate offered by the television’.60
